Apple Music & Privacy

Apple Music is designed to protect your information and enable you to choose what you share.

Apple collects information about your Apple Music activity, such as the songs you play and how long you play them, to personalize the service when you are subscribed, and compensate our partners.

iCloud Music Library sends information from your music library to Apple, such as song and artist names, to identify and unlock copies of any of your songs that are also available in Apple Music.

We associate your iCloud Music Library information with you for as long as you remain subscribed and for a short time after. We retain records of the songs you play for the periods specified by applicable laws relating to financial reporting.

To help identify and prevent fraud, information about how you use your device, including the approximate number of phone calls or emails you send and receive, will be used to compute a device trust score when you attempt a purchase. The submissions are designed so Apple cannot learn the real values on your device. The scores are stored for a fixed time on our servers.

Protecting the privacy and security of your information is a priority for everyone at Apple. We work hard to collect only the data we need to make your experience better, and when we do collect data we believe it’s important for you to know what we’re collecting and why we need it, so you can make informed choices. Apple Music, like every Apple product, is designed with these principles in mind.

Apple collects information about how you use Apple Music in order to tailor features to your musical tastes. These features include For You — where you see albums and playlists picked for you, Radio — which plays selections from your favorite artists and genres, and Connect — which can recommend new artists to follow or posts you’ll find interesting. We also use this information so that we can contact you about upcoming releases, new artists and other happenings on Apple Music that you may like.

If you want to connect or share with other people using Apple Music, you can create a personal profile by providing a user handle (e.g., @johnappleseed), display name and, if desired, a profile photo, and other information. Apple stores this information with your account so that you can access it from any of your devices. Your user handle, display name, and profile photo can appear alongside any content you post and activity that you share on Apple Music. Sharing and posting content are not currently intended for or available to Apple IDs for children.

Other people may also be able to find your Apple Music profile using the information that you’ve provided.

You can make the contents of your profile, like listening activity and playlists, available only to those you choose. However, your profile information, such as handle, display name, photo, your followers, and who you are following, are always visible to everyone.

When you create a profile on Apple Music, we will recommend other Apple Music subscribers with whom you may wish to connect as friends. Apple does not learn or store information from your contacts when checking for friends to recommend. Only shortened and encrypted hashes of the phone numbers and email addresses in your contacts are sent to Apple, and then matching Apple Music subscribers to be recommended are determined locally on your device. Apple Music can periodically check your contacts to recommend new friends in the future; you can control this in Account Settings by disabling “Contacts on Apple Music.” If you do not wish to be found by others based on the Apple ID contact information they may have about you in their contacts, you can change this in Account Settings by disabling “Allow Finding by Apple ID.”

You can also find more people to connect with on Apple Music, and be found by others, by connecting your accounts from social networks, such as Facebook. When you do this, Apple Music will link your Apple Music account to your social network account and find friends on that social network who are also Apple Music subscribers. We do not retain any information about friends who are not Apple Music subscribers. If you later want to disconnect these social networks from your Apple Music account, you can do so in the settings for those connected social networks.

Information that you provide in your profile may be updated or removed by you at any time. Whenever you share online, you should think carefully about what you are making public. When you share from Apple Music to other websites or social networks, anything you share is governed by the privacy policies of those other services.

If your phone carrier offers Apple Music memberships, Apple may check your phone number to determine if you joined through a carrier partner. If you signed up through your carrier, your phone number is used to identify your account. We will use the phone number associated with your membership only to verify your account at sign in and to connect your Apple Music activity with your account.

iCloud Music Library, which is a benefit of your Apple Music membership, allows you to have access to the songs and playlists in your library from any of your devices. This feature sends information from your music library to Apple, such as song and artist names, in order to identify and unlock copies of any of your songs that are also available in Apple Music. Any songs that can’t be found in Apple Music are uploaded to your personal iCloud Music Library, so that you can have access to your complete collection from any of your devices. You can turn off iCloud Music Library in Settings on your device or in iTunes.

When you use Apple Music, we collect information about the songs and videos you play or add to your music library or playlists, and the content you love, comment or share. Information, such as the account, IP address, and device, app, or car interface you used to play, where in Apple Music you were when you played it, the time you played it and for how long, is noted by and sent to Apple. We use this information to customize your Apple Music experience and to help us understand how Apple Music is being used so we may improve it. For example, this information can help us pick the music, videos and artist posts that we show you in For You, Radio, and Connect. It also allows us to make other recommendations to you, that reflect your tastes, pay royalties and prevent or take action against activities that are, or may be, in breach of the Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions or applicable law. You can change your email preferences and opt in or out of receiving emails about new Apple Music content on appleid.apple.com

We also compute a device trust score on your device when you attempt a purchase using information about how you use your device, including the approximate number of phone calls or emails you send and receive, The submission is designed so Apple cannot learn the underlying values on your device. The score is stored for a fixed time on our servers.

We may collect, use, transfer, and disclose non-personal information for any purpose. For example, we may aggregate your non-personal information with that of other Apple Music users in order to improve the service.

All of this information is collected and used in accordance with our privacy policy which can be found at www.apple.com/privacy

Disclosure to Third Parties

We are obligated to provide some non-personal information about your use of Apple Music to strategic partners associated with this service, such as the record labels, so that they can measure the performance of their creative work, meet royalty and accounting requirements, and improve their products and services. We also provide aggregated non-personal statistics about listening activity and user demographics, such as age and gender, to artists so that they may better understand their audiences. Additionally, we may make available certain personal information, like your phone carrier, to partners that work with Apple to provide our products and services, or that help Apple market to customers.

iOS apps may request access to Apple Music and your Media Library. If you give such permission to an app, it can access information like your media library on device, whether you are an Apple Music subscriber, your music and video play activity, and your For You recommendations. A permitted app can also modify data associated with your account, such as which songs are in your library and playlists. You can disable an app’s access on your iOS device in Settings > Privacy > Media & Apple Music. If you have removed the app or granted an app access using a version of iOS prior to iOS 11, you can disable its access in your iTunes account settings.